Display Planner basics

Display Planner shows you the potential reach and cost of targeting ideas to help you plan your Display Network campaigns. The forecasts can help you understand how your ad groups could perform and historical costs can guide you to the ideas that are within your budget.

You can save your plan directly to your AdWords account as a new campaign or as an addition to an existing campaign or ad group. You also have the option to download your plan to review or update at a late time.

This article describes the basic features of Display Planner, including targeting ideas, placement ideas, and forecasting.

Before you begin

Getting started

You can find Display Planner at the top of your AdWords account, under Tools. When you first open Display Planner, you’ll have a choice of four options to start building your campaign. In each section, you’ll enter your campaign language and location targeting, bid type, and ad format filters.

Find new targeting ideas

Search for new targeting ideas using a phrase, website, or category. Choose this option to get started with a broader selection of targeting ideas. You’ll enter keywords, topics, or websites that you think are likely to match your customer interests, and your landing page. That will get Display Planner started with the types of targeting and keywords that can build the foundation of your campaign.

Find top placements by location. In this section, you’ll enter your campaign location and language targeting, bid type, your available ad formats, and topics that are relevant to your business. Using this info, Display Planner will show you the top Display Network inventory for your campaign.

See insights and forecasts for your targeting

In these two sections, you’ll still enter your campaign targeting, bidding, and ad formats. However, to get insights and forecasts specific to targeting you’ve already created, you can add in your existing targeting methods. You can either upload an existing Display Planner plan as a CSV file, or enter your targeting criteria (one per line) in the box. Here’s how these should look:

Get inventory details for your targeting. Here you can enter targeting criteria or upload from a previous plan you’ve made. Once you click Get inventory details, you’ll see inventory data for your targeting ideas. You can then choose to add targeting details like placements and demographics to your plan.

Get performance forecasts for your targeting. Like above, you can also enter targeting criteria or upload from a previous plan you’ve made. Once you click Get performance forecasts, you’ll see a graph of your plan’s potential performance based on bid and budget. You can adjust this graph several ways:

Enter various bids and budgets in the boxes above.

Adjust the “Campaign targeting”, “Bid strategy”, and “Filters” sections on the side.

Click a point on the graph to select that bid.

To add more ideas, click the grey Back to ideas button at the top of the page.